Learning as much as I did about aspects of the Vietnam War I wasn't aware of or hadn't thought to examine before was one of the most valuable parts of this reading experience. Reading it with the support of a classroom environment to talk through some of the viscerally violent scenes and more political context of the text was also extremely helpful, as I think I would've felt lost in all of the historical and cultural impacts otherwise. Generally, the intrigue of our unnamed narrator, a man who's able to empathize on a level that makes his profession as a double agent more complex, kept my interest the entire way through. This was mainly due to the fact that I couldn't always tell if I sympathized with the sympathizer, if I felt pity for the series of events he lives through or general disgust for the way he views and interacts with women (this quality in the narrator is still an uncomfortable one for me). On the other hand, the narrator's relationship with his childhood friends Bon and Man ends up being significant in the narrator's ability to understand how, despite all three of them believing in different political ideologies, America's influence on the war in Vietnam has caused all of them terrible suffering. I was also really interested in this narrator's consistent guilt over the various things he's done as a part of his spy work. We get the occasional glimpse into white interrogation rooms before an extremely violent scene involving a female communist agent at the end reveals just how much trauma this man is holding inside of himself. Witnessing the narrator kill two people and then be essentially haunted by these two people is also a curious craft move to show inner turmoil and guilt. I ended up diving into a conversation with a classmate for the sake of research on the concept of names and namelessness. She framed it like this: "Who's doing the naming and what are their names?" A fascinating question to ask of a book where most of the men are only given names that signify their careers or rank in the military (Commandant, Captain, "crapulent major," etc.), and the two prominent women are given actual names and referenced as such (Ms. Mori/Sophia and Lana). What this is meant to either say or not say about how the narrator views other characters in light of their national identity as Vietnamese-Americans is only complicated by our narrator who never receives a name, but by the end of the book has begun to see himself dually as "a man with two faces." I haven't even mentioned the movie the narrator ends up taking a part in, chiefly in working with and advocating for the Vietnamese refugees acting as extras on the set, tasked with representing their entire people group on the silver screen dictated by an American director. But I could go on and on, and won't for the sake of my own time and sanity. Be wary of the aforementioned violent scenes in multiple parts of this book, but step into it as a whole with an open mind and willingness to engage with a narrator that feels hard to fully grasp in the best possible way.


One of my favorite quotes from The Sympathizer:

"What was it like to live in a time when one's fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one's country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?"

I'll be pretty frank in saying that I didn't really enjoy this essay collection as a whole, though I can most definitely recognize how big of a deal its publication and positive reception were for the world of nonfiction writing. Jamison's intersection of impressive research, self-reflection, and meaningful questions related to the illusive concept of empathy and how we can understand and act it out is interesting as a premise. In execution, though, I got lost along the way. I can't overgeneralize the whole collection with comments about specific essays, but enough of the pieces felt like they were trying to do too many things at once for me to latch onto one solid idea of aboutness and run with that. It really is impressive to see all the different moving parts at work here, within each essay as its own little city as well as the collection as a whole, but it's just a lot. And sometimes I wanted the point Jamison was trying to make concerning empathy to be a bit clearer. This is just my personal preference when I read creative nonfiction essays, and I'm very aware of that. But some of the essay's tones felt overinflated and rose on hot air to the rafters until the general vibe turned pompous and overly academic. I started to get annoyed with how many times I had to reread sentences... But her willingness to experiment with form throughout the entire collection is admirable. The first essay, also titled "The Empathy Exams," is by far my favorite and, seeing as it was the first one I read, I expected the rest of the collection to wow me in equal measure. I can't blame the text for not meeting expectations I set and upheld, but it just continued to sour my overall reading experience. I think I might need to return to the collection for a second read and read everything slower, to give it another chance and digest all of the content crammed into its pages. But for now I'm content to end my review here.


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Some of my favorite quotes from The Empathy Exams:

"Empathy isn't just remembering to say that must be really hard---it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all."

"At what volume does feeling become sentimental? How obliquely does feeling need to be rendered so it can be saved from itself?"

"We're disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy."

"This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it."

"Empathy is contagion."

"How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to."

"The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she's just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it."

The few choice words I'd use to describe this book are melancholy, introspective, wistful, and paranoid. I realize all these words mainly reflect how I view the narrator, Reverend John Ames, who is essentially writing one long letter to his young son. Ames is slowly dying, and already an older man who's lived a long life. The realization you won't be around to watch your seven-year-old son grow old, or witness most of his formative memories, experiences, and develop into his own person, seems like enough to make one think about what kind of legacy they want to leave and how they might take a bit of ownership over how their child may view them. I grew really curious when the very clear epistolary-centered tone at the book's start seemed to evolve into more of a steady stream of consciousness for Ames concerning another character: his best friend's Boughton's son, John Ames' namesake. There's imagery and symbolism left and right suggesting Ames sees John, or Jack Boughton, as a sort of mirror turned back on himself. I took that mirror to be revealing places where Ames fears he wasn't a good enough father or husband in the "caretaking" category. Deeply religious, I think he also sees how Jack has strayed from the church and more traditional behavior glaringly. It's hard to watch your best friend's son make decisions that hurt himself and the people around him; you grow defensive of your best friend. You also generally grow defensive of such an individual being around your wife and impressionable child. With that being said, the careful, almost obsessive attention Ames gives to Jack later in the narrative made me really question if Jack was as untrustworthy as he seemed, or just being painted in a suspicious light by a suspicious narrator. The information revealed about Jack's past and present struggles didn't end up aligning with what I thought might happen, and the surprise really caught my attention in some slower portions of the second half. Truth be told, Jack's story is a sad one, and the way Ames does his best to show empathy and compassion made me a little emotional. The first half is by far my favorite for the many times it attempts to capture quiet joy. Every instance Ames records of observing his son's behavior, from playing with a neighborhood friend to blowing bubbles with his mother in the front yard -- every one of them was heartfelt and pulled on my heartstrings. This careful attention and crafted nostalgia the narrator has for his life while he's still living it feel like the heart of this book. The other heart definitely revolves around the time Ames spends writing about their family history, mainly his relationship and perception of his father and grandfather. A lot of context to the Civil War and the violent South during Ames' grandfather's times, Kansas specifically, influences the storytelling. I consciously tried to make connections between the history Ames referenced and how it related to his hotheaded grandfather and polar opposite pacifist father. Both mens' occupations as preachers (Ames' occupation as well) color the issues they disagreed over even more. The first half's emphasis on the narrator's father and grandfather as people he believes his son should know as told by Ames fascinates me; this theme of preserving and understanding family history became a clear theme from the get go. One thing I had some trouble grasping within the novel was time periods, which is definitely due to there being so many flashbacks and memories cited by Ames as well as current scenes he writes about concerning his son, Boughton, and Jack Boughton. I also liked how Ames described his first wife and the genuine love he had for her before slowly giving readers more information concerning his current wife, Lila, and how their marriage is a quiet one full of love and general stability. I really keep coming back to the words melancholy and wistful, since the narrator's oncoming death hangs over the whole story whether or not the reader is always aware of it. I know I got caught up enough in the story's nuances to forget and then go, "oh yeah, this is a letter with a very pointed, bittersweet purpose." It's an epistolary novel of likes I haven't come across before.


Some of my favorite quotes from Gilead:

"You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have."

"...I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not)."

"You didn't wait till this morning to realize that I am old... How I wish you could have known me in my strength."

"He would say, Peace will come only when that war ends, so the God of peace calls upon us to end it. He said all this with that gun in his belt. And everyone there always shouted amen, even the littlest children."

"I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking."

"'Rejoice with those who rejoice.' I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep. I don't mean that as a joke, but it is kind of funny, when I think about it."

"You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us."

"I knew perfectly well at that time, as I had for years and years, that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him."

"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

I ended up relating to this memoir's general commentary on mental health stigmas and the church. While this author specifically deals with and writes about her experience as a Christian living with bipolar disorder, and I've identified as a Christian who lives with OCD, I appreciated many of Gazmarian's connections to her lived situation, biblical stories, and, you guessed it, doubt. There are several instances in which she cites the Gospels, Old Testament, and New Testament texts to specifically align them with some sort of anecdote in her own life. The narrator is someone who grew up in the Evangelical tradition, and recounts many a time where their diagnosed disorder caused them to seriously question their view of faith. I read this book for a Nonfiction class, and will be meeting the author at a visiting writer event this fall, so getting to discuss various craft moves and opinions with my classmates has shaped my overall perspective on what this memoir attempts to accomplish. I disappointedly must say that every time the author seemed about to crack open a really profound and vulnerable anecdote relating to her struggle with faith and mental health identity, she'd back off and move onto another topic entirely. It turned into a pretty predictable pattern, which made the memoir a relatively easy read, but I wanted to get into the nitty gritty, kind of ugly stuff that the author seemed to want to tiptoe around. I completely understand and respect that when a writer sets out to write a memoir, they have every right to tell their story in the precise way they see fit. I know editors and publishers end up having a pretty big say in concluding matters as well, and this book was picked up by the renowned Simon & Schuster. So even though there are more complex, behind-the-scenes decisions to consider, I wanted to dive deeper into Gazmarian's overall opinion on how the church approaches Christians' mental health struggles. She seems to sort of exist in a vacuum, self-contained to her own world and, eventually, the world of her husband David and the marriage they create for themselves. I did really appreciate how every medication the author was on was listed and explained, that understanding how they affected the author's ability to function or make decisions was paramount to the narrative. As a result, though, some of that vacuum-effect seems to be heightened. But, there isn't a lot of drama to how she tells her story, which I highly appreciate, seeing how such drama could accentuate a story that doesn't need all sorts of glitz and glam to have profound impact. In general, a book like this is delicate since the author still has to interact with the characters she writes about, like her parents, friends, husband, and church congregations. The funny thing about nonfiction is how relationships like these end up affecting how the story gets told. I'm looking forward to meeting and picking Gazmarian's brain for details she may have included in a first draft but had to sacrifice for the sake of edits.